Oblivion: Stories

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

The Pale King

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death....

The Broom of the System: A Novel

At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind-numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great-grandmother, a one-time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays

Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not", considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2", which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and more.

David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words

Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.

The David Foster Wallace Reader

Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.

Infinite Jest

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Underworld

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Gravity's Rainbow

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

White Noise

When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.

Signifying Rappers

Finally back in print - David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom.

McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain

Is John McCain "for real?" That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when McCain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest".

Freedom: A Novel

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.

The Crying of Lot 49

Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy.

Publisher's Summary

Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Girl with Curious Hair is being produced as part of Hachette Audio's ambitious David Foster Wallace audiobook publishing program, joining Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster, and This Is Water, and Broom of the System.

Here are remarkable, hilarious, and unsettling re-imaginations of reality by "a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent " (Jennifer Levin, New York Times Book Review). David Foster Wallace was one of the most prodigiously talented and original young writers in recent American history, and Girl with Curious Hair displays the full range of his gifts. From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.

I finally broke down and bought this David Foster Wallace collection because I had read "Lyndon" before and thought it was written by a genius. I still love "Lyndon," and "Little Expressionless Animals," but the title story "Girl With Curious Hair" was awful--and doubly awful because of the way it was performed. So, it's an uneven collection, but worth it for the good pieces.

But please, Audible, improve your bookmarking. I made a number of bookmarks in one of the stories for a class, but then they suddenly disappeared.

Why on earth didn't you set the tabs at the beginning of each individual story? Do you imagine that listeners are so bovine as to have no opinions about which stories they want to hear, that they'd just as soon listen to all of them with no way of returning to a specific story? Other story collections are set up so you can click forward and go to the next story, so why not this one?? Not a single story begins at the beginning of a tab!! So stupid!!

What was one of the most memorable moments of Girl with Curious Hair?

When I realized they didn't even think that I might want to locate a specific story!!

Any additional comments?

Think about these things from the consumer's point of view, for God's sake. It's like with Infinite Jest, how you decided readers wouldn't care to hear the invaluable footnotes. But at least there was an argument for that boner. There's no excuse for this.

Would you try another book from David Foster Wallace and/or Robert Petkoff?

Yes,p. I would like to listen to many of these stories again but I can't because the chapters on the audible file don't match up to the beginning of the individual stories

What was one of the most memorable moments of Girl with Curious Hair?

When all of the chapter markers do not correspond to the stories in the book

Do you think Girl with Curious Hair needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

You idiots, this is a short story collection, this question makes it clear that you don't give a damn about the listener experience and that all of the editorial work is done by poorly made algorithims

When purchasing an Audio book, the absolute minimal thing I would expect is that the Chapters will be marked and numbered. It boggles the mind that the chapters in this book are randomly cut up and organized into different sections making it impossible to skip to the next story easily.